Skyping, Book Clubs, Libraries, and Galleys

We’ve been home from our 9-day road trip/book tour since Friday night, but I’m just now catching my breath…. After unpacking, doing laundry, grocery shopping, and opening a week’s worth of mail, I finally got back to “work.”

Last night was my first time to be guest author at a book club. The members are all part of my church—St. John Orthodox—here in Memphis. This meeting was for my first book Tangles and Plaques: A Mother and Daughter Face Alzheimer’s. Three of the women in the group have already lost their mother’s—one to Alzheimer’s—and everyone had read the book, so we had a heart-felt discussion about our relationships with our mothers and our own outlook on aging. The group has invited me back in 2018 to meet with them when they read my novel Cherry Bomb. The atmosphere is different from a reading at a bookstore or library… a bit more intimate and interactive. I really enjoyed it.

Next Monday night I’ll have another “first”… I’m Skyping with a book club in Sugar Land, Texas! My high school classmate Stephanie Aucoin Davidson read Cherry Bomb and recommended it to her book club, then they invited me for a “virtual meeting” with them next week. I’ve downloaded the Skype app and practiced using it, so I hope it works out! I’m slowly joining the twenty-first century when it comes to technology. Here’s a funny (but true) story that my kids will laugh at. My 80-something neighbor called me yesterday morning and asked if I could come over and help him figure out some things on his iPhone. I walked across the street and sat down with him in his kitchen, and fortunately, I was able to answer his questions and teach him a few tricks—thanks to help I’ve received in the past from my kids! (A new take on paying it forward!)

I’m already scheduled for three book club meetings in 2018 to discuss Cherry Bomb, so it looks like I’ll have many opportunities for these up-close-and-personal discussions. What a joy!

Meanwhile, my other “project” this week was to finish proof-reading the galleys for the anthology I’m editing, Southern Writers on Writing (University Press of Mississippi 2018), which I finished today. I couldn’t figure out how to use the “sticky notes” on the PDF file, but the press was okay with my low-tech way of sending them corrections. I just wrote down the page numbers, paragraphs, etc., and what the correction was in a Word document and sent it to them. Fortunately there were only 4 corrections in the entire manuscript, which consists of twenty-six essays, a foreword and introduction—kudos to the press for great editing! So I sent off the edits, and the index, which I finished a couple of weeks ago, today.  Ahh.

This gives me a day to relax (tomorrow) before heading down to Starkville, Mississippi, on Thursday to meet with the Friends of the Library Group there. The good people from The Book Mart will be handling sales of Cherry Bomb, so I’ll be able to focus on some (hopefully) lively conversations about the book. Next week I’ll drive down to Oxford and Aberdeen (both also in Mississippi), for events for Cherry Bomb at both of their local libraries. Although I’m a native of Jackson, I rarely—if ever—visited these small towns in my home state, so I’m thankful for the opportunity this book tour gives me for getting to know more of “my people” and the places they call home.